Case Study: Clusters and Image Processing, Part I - page 6

The Case

March 17, 2002

By
Dee-Ann LeBlanc

The remote sensing field is too large for one company or organization to be
able to develop a full range of top-notch tools and have them all be fully
featured. After its initial experience with moving to Linux and Open Source
tools, ImageLinks was pleased with the robust software that Open Source
provides. It decided to merge the intellectual resources of the remote
sensing community and the peer review methods of Open Source. In early
February, 1999, ImageLinks paid a domain name fee of US $70 for
www.remotesensing.org.

On February 5th, the Web site went live. ImageLinks sent email to two
different remote sensing and image-processing mailing lists to announce the
site and a new organization--Open Source Remote Sensing (OSRS). This new
organization had its first external member within 15 minutes. The second
announcement was placed on www.freshmeat.net, a clearinghouse of
technical news and gossip. After a week, OSRS had 100 members.

The first task that OSRS took on was to gather all the existing public
domain source code available for the industry. Every day people tracked down
programs and libraries that met the criteria. Each of these items was added
to the site, and more and more kept coming in. Commercial developers in the
industry stepped up to the plate as well, perhaps seeing a way to both
contribute to the community and ensure that they were a part of it--a sound
business move, and one that ImageLinks itself surely must have considered.
The source for some existing commercial code was handed to OSRS, and other
items were written by the industry expressly with the purpose of giving them
to the community through the organization.

In less than 10 days after the site launched, OSRS was large enough that
it was divided into subgroups to better focus on the various aspects of the
wide range of remote sensing and image-processing topics. Then, on February
15th, the organization got its first third-party exposure: Wired.com called
Mark Lucas for an interview. On February 16th, the article was published. The
Web site was flooded with interest, and the participants on the OSRS mailing
list reached 181, with a new member joining almost every five minutes.

As you might imagine, excitement was growing at ImageLinks. Publicity
grew and hits on the site continued to increase. Then, on February 17th, at
11:30 a.m., someone--perhaps a phone worker, cable worker, or construction
worker digging a foundation--accidentally cut the fiber-optic
data-transmission trunk in Atlanta, causing many on the East Coast to lose
complete or partial access to the Internet. The OSRS Web site--and many
others--was out of commission for seven and a half hours while the phone
company scrambled to repair the damage. Anyone who tried to access the OSRS
Web site at this time wouldn't have been able to do so. However, since the
audience for this project is fairly technologically sophisticated, many of
them probably heard the news that much of the East coast was inaccessible and
tried back again the next day.

Once everything was back up, the OSRS organization got coverage in the
magazine Wired.com. As a result, Mark received the following email (edited
so the recipient's information is unavailable):

Mark contacted the government official directly by phone and began a set
of discussions and negotiations that would have widespread consequences for
the entire remote sensing industry.

Growth has continued since then. Not only has full participation in
www.remotesensing.org grown to at least 900 members, the organization
has also received coverage in the Linux Journal and local coverage
in Florida Today. Government interest has also continued. U.S.
government agencies such as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA)
and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are following
the progress made by OSRS.

The many hours of work put in by ImageLinks and all the others who have
volunteered time and donated materials to OSRS was done for more than just
the benefit of government agencies. This site has become the home of a remote
sensing industry discussion board, an archive of images provided by Core
Software, and a central point to find all the daily news events in the field.
Along with the source code already collected and stored by the community,
volunteer development is going on as well.

Some of the Open Source projects run through the OSRS site are listed in
Table 2.

Table 2 Open source remote sensing
and image processing projects.

Name

Head

Purpose

Digital Elevation Model Tools (DEMTools)

Brian Maddox, of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Mid-Continent Mapping Center

To develop a collection of conversion programs, libraries, and tools capable of working with topographic elevation data.

GeoTIFF

Frank Warmerdam, Independent Consultant

To create the commercial standard for geospatial (digital map) TIFF files. This project actually began before OSRS was formed and then was moved by Warmerdam to this site.

Large Image Manipulation Program (LIMP)

Valient Gough, formerly of StellaCore Corporation and the author of OrthoVista (currently employed by Amazon.com)

This was one of the first projects started on www.remotesensing.org. "Large" refers to image files that are so large that they cannot fully fit into RAM. LIMP is a set of libraries used to build applications that need to process large image files. This type of library set is constantly needed in the remote sensing and GIS fields.

What Mark points out as one of the biggest benefits to the remote sensing
community, however, is that the OSRS site draws together four different
groups that historically have had a difficult time maintaining a dialog:
academics, businesses, entrepreneur developers, and government agencies. The
Web site gives these four groups a central place to discuss issues of mutual
interest and to network among themselves, along with giving them all a
central library for the tools they need.

If you think that you will never intersect with this aspect of graphic
technology, keep in mind that companies in this field produce the maps and
terrain for flight-simulation programs; images of fields for farmers showing
not just a human-visible analysis, but on multiple light spectrums so the
farmer can see details of what areas need water, pest treatment, and so on;
images of miles and miles of land for oil companies to look for natural oil
slicks; images of cities for city planners to see the reality of what the
plans only suggest; and more!